non-stop disk activity

[Per Bothner]

I'm trying to run a server on solar power.  (I can buy a lot
of solar panels for what PG&E would charge to run power lines.)
So I'm trying to figure out how to minimize power.  I tried
using the hdparm -S to spin down the disk drive when idle.
The problem is it never is!

First, the cpuspeed daemon writes out a log message
May 12 10:37:34 kelso kernel: longhaul: FSB:133 Mult:5.5x
multiple times a minute.  This is due to a dprintk in
/usr/src/linux-2.6.5-1.327/arch/i386/kernel/cpu/cpufreq/longhaul.c
I can disable the cpuspeed service, but that doesn't seem like a
good idea if I'm concerned about power usage!  Can this message
be removed?

Second, a bunch of things get run by cron.  mailman wants cron
to run gate_news every 5 minutes.  This is still going on even
after I disables mailman in the services configuration.  I can
presumably edit /var/mailman/cron/*, but I shouldn't have to
if I've turned off the mailman service.

mrtg is also run every 5 minutes, and I have no idea how to
turn that off.

/usr/lib/sa/sa1 is run every 10 minutes, and I'd like to turn
that off or run it less frequently.  (I assume this is
"system accounting" but I'm not sure).

These are bad enough, but when I run iostat it tells me that
something is writing to the disk every 5 or 10 seconds!  If
I can't fix this there is no way to ever spin down the disk.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per at bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/